Chapter Text
Being an organized person isn’t so bad. He has a stable job, which is good; the bad news is that he doesn’t know how to drive. Of course, he’s perfectly aware that he should learn, but he has consciously chosen not to do so. He prefers the slow rhythm of his own footsteps and the predictable network of public transportation. It’s one of those decisions that, for him, outline the contours of his freedom: a silent rejection of a rush that never belonged to him.
As he moves quietly through the streets, the man takes a sip of his favorite soda. Hydration is important, he thinks, because of the calories the body burns without even asking for permission. Sweets are a small distraction that’s impossible to ignore, but fortunately for him, that craving is easily mitigated with a cup of bitter coffee later on. Everything has its balance, its carefully calculated counterweight.
The thing is… he misses his previous life in a peculiar way, although, if he thinks about it, there’s no tangible difference between the one he had and the one he lives now. The same apartment, the same routine. Perhaps what he longs for isn’t a time, but the slight unconsciousness that accompanied him back then, the feeling that things simply happened, without a reason to examine.
Among the crowd starting their day, stopping obediently at the red light, the man makes an unconscious gesture. He lifts the wrist of the hand holding the can and slides up the sleeve of his impeccable suit, folding the fabric upward with a precise movement. As he’s already used to, there isn’t a trace of a Trust Value on his skin. There are no glowing numbers rising or falling, no public judgments etched onto his wrist. In short, he is free. Anonymous. Invisible.
He is not a hero, not the most important, nor is he the famous «Hero X.» Just a simple citizen. That should be enough. And, deep down, for him, it is enough.
The light turns green and the man crosses the street, blending into the flow of people. He checks the digital watch he always wears on his other wrist—a gesture of pure practicality, not surveillance—and, seeing that he’s making good time, his feet seem to drift of their own accord toward the window of a pastry shop. These are the little pleasures one can allow oneself if one so chooses. With a confident finger, he points through the glass at a small ice cream cake, a perfect portion for his brief ten o’clock break.
As he receives the bag, the cold already seeping through the paper, the hand he knows all too well appears. He could pull the cake away, could dodge the gesture with an excuse, but he doesn’t. He knows the futility of that defensive act.
“Is that mine?”
“It’s mine,” he replies, with a calmness that sounds like anticipated resignation.
“Oh, come on! You’re not the type to be picky about food.”
“No, but I know you’ll steal it from me anyway,” he says, and there’s no bitterness in his voice, just a stated fact, another variable in the day’s equation.
Without wasting another second, he turns to the owner of the shop, pays, thanks with a slight nod of his head, and, without hesitation, hands the bag to his “older brother.” Even though he’s never had one in his entire life, there’s always a first time for everything. Or perhaps, some roles assign themselves, regardless of blood or years.
He extends the bag, with its pretty purple wrapping, toward the adult who, deep down, is more of an eternal child.
“Here you go, Satoru.”
This world is like a language he’ll never fully understand, and he accepts it with the ease of someone who prefers not to get involved in other people’s affairs. The fact that he doesn’t possess what the elders call ‘Cursed Energy,’ and that he can’t do what Satoru does, doesn’t fill him with envy, despite what everyone thinks. Envy, he considers, is a useless expenditure of energy, a desire twisted by what belongs to others that clouds the view of what is one’s own.
To begin with, almost no one knows that he comes from that group, from that clan with the name Gojo. It’s a fact he keeps with the same care he uses to fold his clothes: orderly, discreet, out of sight. There is no cursed energy in his blood, and this absence, which members describe with a certain tone of condescending amazement, has been called «Heavenly Restriction.» A grandiose name for what he experiences as a simple fact: his normality. Although at one point the question arose as to whether he could use Cursed Tools to compensate, he chose, with quiet firmness, not to get involved. He preferred to let professionals be professionals.
No one opposed his wishes. Deep down, all of them—the elders, the technicians, the whispers of the clan—hoped that this ‘older brother’ of his and he would never cross paths. He was a silent anomaly, an uncomfortable reminder that even in the most perfect system, a zero can slip through. A defect to all of them. A piece that didn’t fit into the grand design, and therefore, better left aside.
Sometimes, in the stillness of his tidy room, he still wonders how he came to be born in this world, if all he did the night before appearing here was go to bed and sleep. There was no shining portal, no tragic accident, not even a vivid dream. Just the everyday act of closing his eyes in one place and waking up in another, with a foreign name on the lips of strangers and a sense of emptiness.
Satoru is simply there, and he is here.
“Sakumo.” The voice of his rebellious brother brings him back to the sidewalk, as the aforementioned plants himself directly in front of him, blocking the way. He stretches his arms into the air in a broad, dramatic gesture, as if he had just accomplished some great feat.
“Hmm, what are you doing here?”
Both of them are fifteen years old at the moment, although sometimes the distance between them seems to be measured in centuries, not months.
“I’m visiting my brother,” declares Satoru, as if it were the most obvious and sufficient explanation in the universe.
“You don’t have permission for that,” Sakumo replies, his tone flat, a statement of fact rather than a reproach.
Satoru rolls his eyes, a pose perfected in its theatricality. He tilts his head back, and with a fluid motion, sweeps his messy white hair away from his face. The sunlight seems to vibrate around his figure. “I don’t need anyone’s permission to come see my brother. Certainly not from those sacks of rancid bones. Satisfied?”
Sakumo doesn’t respond to the provocation. Instead, he glances for a moment at the watch on his wrist, an almost imperceptible tic. “And school?”
“Yes,” Satoru nods, imitating his formality only to break it instantly. “And why aren’t you at the school for ordinary people?” He still uses that disdainful tone, full of a superiority that isn’t malicious, but simply… part of who he is. “Wasn’t I right? The schools for the common weak can’t teach us anything, brother.”
Sakumo holds the gaze of those blue eyes, too bright, that see everything and, at times, seem to miss the essential. “I don’t go to school,” he corrects, with a patience that sounds like habit. “I go to work.”
“We’re much too young to work,” Satoru replies, already nibbling on the cake, as if the objection were as insignificant as the crumbs.
“I’d remind you that you work too,” Sakumo points out with a gentle tilt of his head, his clear gaze behind his glasses. “Doing that, without pay yet. Isn’t that exploitation?” He refers, of course, to the cursed spirits he cannot see, but whose existence he accepts as naturally as he accepts the humidity in the air.
The difference between Satoru and him isn’t just a matter of ability or energy. It’s physical, even. Satoru doesn’t just seem different—he embodies something foreign: not a single feature ties him to the ordinary Japanese. He is strikingly tall, with white hair that seems to capture the light and blue eyes so deep that sometimes they give the impression of seeing through things, and through people, as if they were made of fine glass. He is a dazzling figure, a phenomenon.
For Sakumo, on the other hand, it’s reassuring to know he’s still himself. His physical appearance is exactly as he’s always known it: a bit of myopia corrected by discreetly framed glasses, a tall but not disproportionate stature, and straight black hair that he combs simply. He doesn’t have a flashy personality—he knows this—but that isn’t a problem, it’s simply a condition. While Satoru is an event, Sakumo is the background against which that event stands out. And in that background, in that carefully maintained normality, he finds a space of his own that no one else claims.
“In any case, you should go,” he warns, with a final tone that leaves little room for negotiation. He knows Satoru wants to talk more—he always wants to talk more, or maybe he just wants to be heard—and in some ways, perhaps he should be more like his older twin in that: giving in to impulse, prolonging the moment. But it’s not in his nature. His order is also a boundary.
“Wait—”
The word hangs in the air, but Sakumo has already turned away. Despite the time he’s spent here, deep in his mind, a part of him still waits, with patient and silent stubbornness, to return to his world. At any moment. It’s a passive kind of waiting, without anxiety, more like the certainty that a train will eventually arrive at its station. In the meantime, he follows the schedules, obeys the rules, doesn’t tie himself down.
He doesn’t even give his brother a final glance. He knows Satoru is still standing there, unmoving in the middle of the flow of people who surround him without touching him. Perhaps watching him with those eyes that see everything, perhaps with an expression somewhere between exasperation and curiosity. Sakumo doesn’t need to turn around to confirm it.
All he does is raise an arm, his hand open in a brief, clear gesture of farewell, and keeps walking. The purple bag is no longer in his hand, the cake is no longer his responsibility, and the brother he left behind is, like the rest of this world, a complex language he has decided not to try to master. His path, for now, is the one that leads to the office, to routine, to the predictable stillness of his own space.
When he arrived at work—a four-hour shift as a cleaning assistant in an office building—he paused for a moment in front of the service door, and for the first time that day, a concrete question arose in his mind: why the suit?
It wasn’t an anguished inquiry, but an exercise in logic. The image was, without a doubt, discordant: the discreet yet impeccable elegance of his finely tailored suit, set against the anonymous cubicles, the buckets and bottles of cleaning supplies. He observed his own blurry reflection in the doorknob: the neatly tied tie, the starched shirt. It wasn’t a work uniform, of course.
The answer, when it came, was simple and free of drama: habit.
With that serene conclusion, he opened the door and went in.
The next time they see each other is not exactly as he expected. His footsteps echo over the rubble, a measured and solitary sound, while a rarely asked question pulses in his mind: Should I do this?
It’s not common for him to interfere in the affairs of the clan that so openly disdains him and whose rules he is, tacitly, always at odds with. His unwritten pact was non-interference.
But logic, that internal compass, presents him with a different calculation this time. He thinks that, perhaps, using the identity of the other version of himself could be useful. At least in this singular contest, he concludes, his eyes tired behind half-closed lids. The calculation is clear: certain processes must be allowed to run their course.
He cannot, nor does he want to, interfere in a matter of awakening power. Those are mysteries that belong to Satoru, to the chosen ones, to the enlightened. He is only a spectator. That’s why, dressed in the immaculate white uniform and the red tie marked with an ‘X’ in the center, with his white hair slicked back with absolute severity, he stops right at the edge of the scene. In front of him is not the explosive and theatrical brother, but the lifeless eyes, empty of all habitual consciousness, of Gojo Satoru.
He sees him lying in the pool of blood that contrasts with the blinding whiteness of his hair and clothes. The wind howls violently, lifting dust and the metallic scent of battle, but the teenager only calmly adjusts the bridge of his yellow sunglasses with a finger. Behind those tinted lenses, his clever eyes—fox eyes, accustomed to watching from the thicket—examine with clinical coldness the other teenager, the fallen hero, the brother lying defeated by his own reflection.
The teenager in the white suit moves unhurriedly toward the ground floor of the sorcerer’s school. His steps, silent and sure, lead him with absolute certainty toward the catacombs. He knows they are there; the man he is looking for, in fact, has already arrived.
“I want to be… just a little longer!” The girl’s voice, laden with desperate longing, reaches from the shadows of the tunnel. “I want to go to many places with everyone and I want to see many things with everyone together and much more. So much more!”
“Riko… let’s go home…” Another voice responds, tense and deep. That must be Geto Suguru, he deduces. Then, the figure pointing at the girl must be the subject in question, the epicenter of this chaos.
Without warning, without even a whisper of disturbance in the air, he appears directly in front of Toji Fushiguro. He grants the assassin a fraction of a second—a minimal opportunity, almost a formality—before extending his hand. His fingers, slender and pale, touch the tip of the gun barrel at the exact instant the trigger begins to yield. A dry snap, deep as the strike of a drum in a sealed chamber, reverberates through the space. He sees with absurd clarity, as if time itself slows down, how the metal of the weapon folds, crumples, and disintegrates into a cloud of fine metallic paper that falls inertly to the ground. Toji’s eyes, once cold and calculating, bulge with a stupid astonishment that borders on the comical.
“It wasn’t going to end well—” the teenager says, simply. His tone is flat, as if he were commenting on a mistake in an equation.
But Toji Fushiguro is not just anyone. Surprise turns into animal instinct in a nanosecond. Before the sentence can even finish, the assassin has already recovered, and there is something—the grip of another weapon, a knife, a fist wrapped in residual curse—just centimeters from the head of the boy in white. He simply leans to one side, a movement so economical it seems like an optical illusion. His hand, still in the air, closes not on the weapon, but on the wrist that wields it. A dry twist, a torque that speaks of absurd strength contained beneath a slender appearance, and Toji is hurled like a bundle of dirty laundry several meters back, crashing against the stone wall with a dull thud.
In the same fluid motion, the teenager reappears, positioning himself between the two stunned young sorcerers and the danger.
“Satoru?” He hears Geto Suguru’s voice behind him, laden with confusion and incredulous hope.
Between the shadows and the cloud of dust raised by the impact, Toji’s silhouette rises again. Blood runs down his forehead from an ugly scratch, but his smile is wider, fiercer than ever. He shakes off the dust with a shrug.
“Oh, what a lovely show…” he applauds slowly, the sound of his palms echoing in the chamber. “I didn’t see that one coming.” His eyes, like those of a predator who has just found an unexpectedly interesting prey, scrutinize the newcomer. “Tell me, who are you, brat?”
“You can call me X,” he boasts, though his voice is flat, completely devoid of any real presumption. It’s just a fact, a functional label. “I’m afraid I can’t let you complete your mission.”
“What about the suit? Is it your uniform?” Toji mocks, though in his eyes shines an immediate and brutal recognition. He knows, as generally everyone in the environment knows, what that specific absence of cursed energy combined with such a disturbing presence usually means. The assassin reacts once he’s certain. “A Heavenly Restriction.”
He says nothing. There’s no need to respond; people always tend to fill in the blanks for him, drawing their own conclusions, and they rarely get it wrong on the surface. It’s less complicated that way.
When he turns, deliberately ignoring the other man, he slips his hands into the pockets of his trousers, adopting a nonchalant posture that grotesquely contrasts with the scene of blood and tension.
“I’m not Satoru,” he clarifies, addressing Geto without looking at him directly. “Now, he should be fine. He was cut in half, but he’ll eventually be okay.” He says it with the same naturalness as someone reporting the weather forecast.
“W-What?” Suguru speaks, utterly incredulous, his voice broken by shock.
His attention shifts for a moment to Amanai Riko. The girl has the flutter of a butterfly—the aura of her destiny, the whirlwind of possibilities—greater and more convulsive than he’s ever seen. He notes it silently, registering it as just another clinical fact.
“I’ll handle this.” The phrase leaves his lips at the same time his body acts. He pulls a hand from his pocket at the exact instant he knows, with absolute certainty, that Toji is barely two centimeters from the girl’s heart, having moved with supernatural speed behind them.
The eyes behind the yellow glasses see everything, and then the world distorts. An amalgam of colors that only X can perceive—fractals of reality, vectors of force, schemes of gravity—emerges, weaving itself in the air and binding the two men in a single web of alteration. Toji is brutally thrown off balance when gravity is literally separated from his body at a specific point.
His physical superiority, that currency he relies on, is torn away as he watches, with visceral astonishment, how the reality around him is shaped into incomprehensible and threatening geometric figures. He tries to take a stance of strength, to grab his cursed tool, but it’s useless. As soon as he lifts his gaze, the figures vanish, replaced by absolute emptiness: a silent black hole, stars flashing everywhere, and a dark, infinite sky… This… this doesn’t resemble any expansive domain he knows. Is it?
Toji grips the handle of his cursed tool with fury, but he knows, with a chill running down his spine, that he can’t use it here. This is not the reality in which he killed Gojo Satoru.
One more snap, dry and final. And Toji falls to the ground without ceremony, the impact echoing with a dull thud against a surface that shouldn’t be there. The slow, measured steps of X make the assassin lift his head, unsurprised not to feel the edge of a weapon against his throat. Only the impassive gaze.
This whole place is filled with floating frames, like fragments of universes suspended in nothingness. The man—no, the brat who looks down at him—seems like a standing corpse. There is no drama on his face, no fury, not even interest. Nothing.
“You’re a Gojo,” Toji spits out, more as a forced conclusion than a question.
“Please, not everyone with white hair comes from there, right? Zenin Toji,” he says, for the first time using the full name, imbuing it with a meaning that goes beyond lineage. “I still can’t believe,” he adds, with a tone that finally carries a hint of something like perplexity, “that you’re the most catastrophic reason I’ve ever had to follow.”
“What are you talking about?” Toji’s growl is rough, loaded with a confusion that borders on anger.
X simply raises a hand, with the languidness of someone adjusting the volume on a television, and the reality around them changes. The floating frames dissolve, replaced by a different scene, sharper, more cruel.
“They say parents can recognize their blood no matter the time or the form,” X comments, his monotone voice cutting through the dreamlike silence. “The question is: can you do it?”
At that, Toji, unwilling to see but with no choice, first recognizes the small back, the dark, messy hair. Megumi. The name hits his chest with the force of a closed fist. Then, the smaller figure at his side, Tsumiki.
“What?” The word leaves his lips like a broken whisper. Now it’s his turn to try to get up, to approach. He does so, driven by an instinct he thought extinct, but an invisible line, an absolute boundary in this manipulated space, restricts him from taking another step. He remains there, trapped, forced to be only a spectator.
He doesn’t hold the best place among his children, and he knows it with a certainty that burns in his gut. He can’t see them and tell them how sorry he is that nothing has changed, that the father he perhaps, in a moment of weakness, dreamed of being, was distant from the very beginning. There was never salvation for a broken vase from the moment it was born, and he dragged them into the shards.
But what he sees next is not abandonment, but something infinitely worse. The images follow one another, cold and detailed: his children being hunted, used, discarded as if they were worms to be crushed without a second thought. It doesn’t sit well with him. It churns the emptiness inside, filling him with something new and horrible: a concrete, personal horror that has his eyes and his blood.
“Your actions,” explains X’s flat voice, like the narrator of a grim documentary, “cause someone to take over the body of someone important. Then, they use that weakness, that door you opened, to bring down the pillars of this world. Of the two, only your son survives. Or, rather, a part of him does.”
No.
No, No, No…
Denial is not a scream, but a silent collapse within him. Megumi and Tsumiki… they can’t die like this. He wasn’t a sorcerer, he wasn’t born in a cradle of perfect love as they were supposed to be. He learned to kill as one learns to defend oneself from a beast, and that was, in the end, the only thing he knew how to give them: the warning of danger, not the tool for happiness. But as the images pass—the daughter of his wife, the one named after a clear moon, then the boy with his same cold eyes—and the information, cold and logical, intensifies in his mind, Toji doesn’t know what to do. The impotence, a feeling he thought he had eradicated, drowns him.
“You must be lying to me,” he growls, but the strength has left his voice. It’s a last resort, a burning nail to cling to.
“Maybe,” X concedes, with devastating lightness. “Fate is capricious by nature. All I can show you is the most probable line, the strongest echo of now. What you do with that…” He pauses for a moment, and for the first time, there is a hint of something like genuine interest, even if it’s macabre, in his tone. “What are you going to do, Zenin Toji?”
“Who is responsible?” The question leaves Toji’s lips like a red-hot knife, cutting through the air thick with visions. As he speaks, the screen of reality that X manipulates shifts, moving the images of his children aside to focus on the figure that, ironically, he had come to eliminate today too.
Geto Suguru. Is it him? The possibility settles in his mind with a cold logic, but at the same time, it doesn’t quite fit. He’s been watching them since he was hired for this mission. He knew the dynamic: Gojo’s dazzling arrogance and Geto’s calculated restraint. The strong thread of protection, almost paternal, that Geto felt for ordinary humans—so contrary to Gojo’s cold detachment—was immense, but genuine. It didn’t match the ruthless carnage shown to him by the visions.
But then, as his hunter’s gaze analyzes every detail of the appearance that the future Geto—or the possible future—presents, he realizes. The lines crossing the man’s forehead, that grotesque pattern… They’re not tattoos. Toji, who has killed everything from humans to special-grade curses, recognizes the mark of a forced possession, of a corruption that consumes from within. It’s a damned parasite. Whatever it is, something controls that kid’s body, using his power, his knowledge, his pain, like a glove.
“I’ll try everything I can to keep you from being killed.”
The voice of X interferes with his thoughts, flat as always, but the words carry a different weight now. They sound less like a promise and more like the statement of an experiment. In the same instant, the familiar dry snap of X echoes in the non-place space, not as a simple sound, but as the strike of a giant gong vibrating in his bones and mind. The wave of force, pure and disruptive, blinds him partially—not with light, but with perception. It’s as if reality itself flickered, forcing him to let go of the thread of rage and confusion to cling to the simple awareness of his own body still breathing.
When the sensation subsides and his vision returns in fits and starts, Toji finds himself once again in the chamber of the catacombs, the smell of blood and stone dust replacing the stellar void. X stands a few meters away, looking at him without expression. Geto and the girl, Amanai, are behind him, shocked and pale. The weight of the cursed tool in his own hand tells him that time, here, has barely passed.
But everything has changed. The contract, the mission, the price… all pale in comparison to the images burned into his retina: the future parasite in Geto’s body, and the fate of his children. The question is no longer who is responsible. The question, the one that now burns in his eyes as he fixes his gaze first on Geto and then on the impassive figure of X, is much simpler and much more complex.
What do I do now?